"They are lessening the likelihood that we can arrest the people we know who are behind the crimes," Jones told KCRA 3 on Thursday.

In an exclusive interview with KCRA 3, Jones shared his reactions to a KCRA 3 investigation revealing that nearly 10,000 parolees in California are missing.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is now reviewing 9,209 arrest warrants of those missing parolees to determine which ones "should be waived, discharged from state parole supervision and recall of the warrant, or if the parolee should remain on parole," according to a memo obtained by KCRA 3.

"Seventy percent of those folks who get out are going to re-offend," said Jones, citing California's 70 percent recidivism rate for inmates released from state prison. "So, you have a whole cadre of folks that have the opportunity to re-offend that might not otherwise have re-offended with much less supervision and much less consequences."

Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully is also worried.

"You shouldn't get a get-home-free card simply because you never did what you were supposed to do," Scully said.

The district attorney told KCRA 3 that discharging a missing felon from supervised parole would eliminate an important law enforcement tool.

"When someone is on parole, even if it's on informal parole, there's always the condition of search and seizure," Scully told KCRA 3.

"If they wipe out these parolees at large and discharge them, law enforcement does not have the search and seizure tools to do some enforcement," Scully said.

"At this point, it's way too early to see whether or how many of those warrants will be discharged," said Jeffrey Callison, press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Starting July 1, 2013, the responsibility for revoking parole will move to the courts from the Board of Parole Hearings.

"We're just looking through warrants to make sure that what we're passing on to the courts are worth passing on the courts," Callison said.

"The state is washing its hands of thousands of repeat felons," said Mike Rushford, president of Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. "This is a way to falsely lower the recidivism rate for repeat criminals. You simply take them off your books.

"It's the state deciding to cook the books by releasing these criminals into the communities without supervision and then step up and say, 'see, this is working.'"